


When the World Stills

by kdoyochi



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Freeform, M/M, dreamies on vacay, moon and wind and world endings and blackouts, very self indulgent lmao
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:40:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24274483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kdoyochi/pseuds/kdoyochi
Summary: From the veranda, the world looks abandoned.
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun/Lee Jeno
Kudos: 38





	When the World Stills

**Author's Note:**

> unbeta-ed / [Playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1KR9yzZU9gDQVpGIynTJ2m?si=FarjwR0DSpOe-RpoDLrYWA)

From the veranda, the world looks abandoned.

The trees sway with the wind—repeating patterns, soft then harsh. He hears the way they cut through it, the way they follow, his eyes still trying to adapt to the darkness that has enveloped them. From a distance, a faint light illuminates its immediate surroundings, a stark contrast to the absence of light elsewhere. 

Someone approaches from behind, he hears first before seeing: the creaking of the screen door, the light thud when it closes on its own, then, "Hey. What are you doing out here?"

He shifts his body. For a moment, the moon peeks out from the clouds and the world bathes in the light it reflects from the sun, making everything a bit clearer. He watches as the other takes up the space beside him, his beauty illuminated.

“Just thinking,” he replies, looking ahead again. The faint light continues to glow from a distance, even as the moon hides again. “Isn’t it kind of cool?”

“What? A blackout?”

“Mm-hmm, we’re someplace else, no electricity. The wind is strong. Kind of feels like it’s the end of the world, no?”

From beside him, the other only hums and reaches out to hold his hand. They let the silence sit with them, occasionally broken by laughter and chatter from inside the house, which resides overlooking those in lower planes. They’re disconnected from it, the inside and outside, the space they occupy seemingly a place of its own.

"You ever think about how the world can stop right now and we'll never know?" 

He feels the other’s eyes but doesn’t move to meet them.

"Not really."

"When I was a kid,” he begins, taking in the way dark shades of blue and different shades of black become more apparent, “my mom would bring out candles and these balloons whenever there was a blackout."

"Yes, you've told me."

He looks down at their hands, all blurred details and edges. He wonders if his hands are still his own. Maybe they aren’t, maybe they are. There’s no use thinking about things like this, he thinks, the other’s presence beside him and the world’s apparent end the only things that matter.

"I wish we had some balloons right now."

"You could always bring some out."

He looks at him, then. He’s all blurred details and edges, too.

"How would I do that?"

From above, the moon peeks out again. The wind continues to blow. The faint light continues to be.

"Well, this is your world we live in."

**—**

“Hang out in my room if Hyuck bothers you too much.”

He looks up from his phone to look at Jeno, who’s leaning against the doorframe, then to Donghyuck, who’s staring at Renjun with an overly inquisitive glint in his eyes, then to Jeno again, finally realizing that the silence has stretched too long past the lines of comfortable and is already bordering awkward. He clears his throat, tries his best not to recoil from Jeno’s gaze.

“What are you talking about?” he asks, praying his voice is light, already wondering if it’s convincing. “You can put Donghyuck and me in a room for a whole year and we’ll both be alive by the end of it.”

Jeno parts his lips slightly.

Renjun tries to ignore the way it draws out from somewhere inside him something he's tried so hard to extinguish. 

"Hey, _Jeno-ssi_ ," Donghyuck butts in, because of course Donghyuck knows. "If you're feeling lonely, just say so."

“ _Jeno-ssi_ ,” he copies, a little bit more easily now, “is Jisung too busy playing with Chenle?”

Jeno scrunches his nose, crosses his arms across his chest, and frowns slightly—serious while also playful. "I don't know a _Jisung_."

"If you say so," Renjun replies. He breaks into a genuine smile, sucks on his teeth, and tilts his head before saying, “Stop sulking.”

He follows with his eyes the way Jeno pouts just a tiny bit, shrugs his shoulders, and retreats back outside, leaving behind an unresolved tension he's already decided to never address. It only takes a couple of seconds before another head peeks into their room—those few seconds enough for him to drag time out without going past to defensive and reluctant—not that Donghyuck wouldn't know. He's always been oddly and, this time, woefully perceptive. 

Jaemin, with his light blue hair, proceeds into their room upper body first—head, neck, broad shoulders—fingers gripping the doorframe, bright smile plastered on his face. “Injun,” he begins—Donghyuck interjects with a groan and _Why is it always Renjun?_

“Anyway, Injun,” Jaemin continues, both of them ignoring Donghyuck incessantly clicking his tongue, “manager-hyung says we can use the kitchen. He’ll be back with manager-noona later.”

He hums and looks at his phone for the time. _18:36._ The sun's just about to set.

"Okay," he answers, standing up. He almost hits his knee against the chair that's right beside his bed as he grabs his airpod case on the desk in front of it. Donghyuck's gone back to typing something on his phone, probably messaging Mark or Jungwoo or maybe Taeil-hyung, the unspoken conversation they've shared just moments before he's clearly chosen to keep as that—unspoken, and buried. 

He looks at Jaemin, waiting for him by the door, and smiles. Jaemin isn't as perceptive as Donghyuck, but the comfort his presence provides is just as much.

And maybe it's not so bad for things to remain this way if he gets to keep this, he thinks, looking at the way Jaemin's smiling softly at him, hearing the way Donghyuck's humming something familiar under his breath, feeling the way Jisung's and Chenle's laughs and their bickering from somewhere inside the house fill his insides with warmth, knowing that somewhere near him, Jeno's there—with them, with him.

The power goes out just as they’re about done eating. 

He's holding a fork to his mouth, a piece of dumpling dipped in what he and Jaemin would call their trademark special spicy sauce pierced through its tines, when it does. He jumps more from Jisung's sudden grip on his shoulder than the sudden, abrupt darkness, consequently reaching for Jeno out of instinct from the surprise—all the while his other hand, on autopilot, finishes the dumpling's course to his mouth. The metal clinks with his teeth, making him grimace a bit.

There's chatter around the table—it's one of those circular tables with a lazy Susan in the center—as Jaemin fishes his phone out of his pocket; Donghyuck already has his, flashlight lit.

"Text manager-hyung," Chenle says to no one in particular.

He breaks out of his stupor then, turning to look at his hand and becoming aware that they're still linked like that. His face heats up just a little bit, and he's grateful Donghyuck's light, pointlessly pointed somewhere at their back, illuminates Jeno's face a bit too harshly instead of his. 

"Scared?" He looks up to Jeno's face, sees the smirk that's playing on his lips. "You can hold my hand."

Had this happened perhaps a year back, he'd be ready with something sharp-witted. As it stands, he only huffs, half-munched dumpling still in his mouth, and retrieves his hand. Tearing his eyes away from the other, he turns to his other side. “You can let go now.”

Jisung only laughs somewhat bashfully, the only person around this table who had witnessed their exchange, and returns to eating his meal, oblivious.

In the dark, with only Jaemin’s and Donghyuck’s phones to provide them light, it looks like they’re in a film set. Like one of those scenes that precedes a lot of unexplainable things—maybe Jisung’s about to be abducted by extraterrestrial beings, or maybe Chenle, who’s already stood up and is busy rummaging through the cabinets to look for candles—Who even keeps candles for situations like this in this country anymore?

Renjun tries not to think about accidentally glancing somewhere the light doesn’t illuminate and catching a glimpse of something he’d rather not see in this lifetime. The thought makes a shiver run down his spine, and he almost jumps out of his seat when Jeno nudges him with his foot.

He snaps his head at him, glaring, although his features immediately soften with the way Jeno’s looking at him. 

“You alright?” the other asks.

See, amidst all disorder, every single day, no breaks, there's always this. 

Renjun bites the inside of his cheek and hums, glancing down to Jeno's hand, suddenly not caring about trying to keep up a facade. 

“They said they'll take a few hours,” Jeno tells him, phone in hand, when he notices where he’s looking, grossly misreading the situation. Then, more loudly for the group, body addressing the table again, “Manager-hyung said they'll take a few hours. They don’t know why the power suddenly went out. And it seems like the genset hasn’t been set up yet, so we’ll need to wait for them to get back. Each of us rotate using his phone as a flashlight. No one’s allowed to go out.”

Just as Jeno says all this, Renjun’s fingers continue to throb from where they had touched Jeno’s skin. He bites back the feelings that bubble inside him, back down to his gut, allowing it to settle there, hoping eventually they'll be put to sleep.

A couple more minutes and Donghyuck stands up, fully drawing to the side the curtains that cover the window partly separating the veranda from the inside, allowing the living room to be covered in a lucid blue tinge. “Seems like it’s a blackout. Weird.”

Suddenly, Jisung says, "Don't go out."

"Why?" he asks, curious, watching Jisung stand up and take up the space next to Donghyuck.

“The moon looks like it’s about to gobble the world up,” Jisung answers, awe in his voice evident.

He looks out at the moon from where he's sitting, his field of view taking in the whole living room—Chenle sprawled out across one couch, Jaemin on the other, Jeno still seated close to him.

All majestic and godly, the moon does look like it’s about to gobble up the town it hovers over.

Renjun watches as the wind brings clouds over, momentarily hiding its beauty, allowing the moon to feel what it's like to disappear. The three of them continue looking at the scene in front of them for quite a while, even while the other half have gone off to do something else, watching as the moon hides then shows itself, over and over and over.

There's only so much all of them can do in a situation like this. 

They’d opened the windows to let the somewhat cooler but still humid air from the outside in, had turned off the lights from their phones, repeating patterns of darkness and soft blue light they've become comfortable with.

Practically begging their managers for just a few hours of unsupervised freedom, asking each of them to go meet the local crew that'll be showing them the locations they'll be filming in in the next couple of days, they hadn't pictured out this particular scenario to play out. Annoyance had turned to wonder, then to excitement, then to a lazy, silent idleness.

Currently only the two of them remain—him and Jeno.

It's a little confusing, Jeno usually getting tired of how he and Jisung can talk about about a thousand different things in a span of a couple of minutes. Jeno had returned after a while, and Jisung had left a little bit after to go back to his shared room with Chenle.

He had decided he can't really keep avoiding being alone with him for the rest of their lives, though, not that the thought was particularly appealing, so he had accepted the situation as it was. The space had been filled with stifling silence, sporadically cut through with meaningless small talk. 

Renjun wonders how long it's been since they've talked—just the two of them.

Looking out the window, Jeno's lying down on the couch Jaemin had previously occupied. He occupies the other couch—the space between them, the darkness, the quiet allowing him a little bit of courage. He’s not so sure he’ll be able to talk with Jeno like this had they not been darker hues and blurred edges.

“Do you ever think about what your life would be like if your mother didn’t tell you SM called her again?” he asks. It's a question he had thought of a couple of times the past couple months, after the sudden realization dawned upon the both of them—and Donghyuck, it seems, though he's not quite sure when that happened.

“Sometimes,” Jeno replies after a moment. “Why?”

He shrugs, switching to staring at and playing with the hems of the shirt he’s wearing.

"What movies have you been watching again?"

He clicks his tongue. "Do you have anything else better to do than talking to me?"

He hears Jeno chuckle, the sound only able to survive their close proximity. Cut off from the rest of the world, as always, when he's with Jeno. It still scares him a bit, how alright he feels about it.

“Well, it doesn’t really do anything dwelling on those things, does it? Can’t really have those regrets. Not like you’ll know what would’ve happened if this or that happened.”

"I guess,” he mumbles. He wants to say that’s completely easier said than done, wants to ask how Jeno does it. He doesn’t. “But it still feels weird sometimes. Sometimes I think about how in some faraway place, there’s another me living a completely different life."

Jeno hums in acknowledgement. “You know,” he resumes, a hint of pensiveness in his voice, “there’s this particular moment I would sometimes think about.”

"Yeah?" he asks, hands still playing with the hems of his shirt.

"When I was a kid, my family and I went to the countryside."

He turns to look at him. First from the corner of his eyes, then just completely looking at him.

Jeno has his face turned to the outside, eyes sharp as he looks out the window. Renjun’s eyes have long well adjusted to the dark, so it's not hard to recognize the other’s features—not like he hadn't spent nights committing them to memory. He’s almost completely lying down, back resting on one of the couch’s arms, knees folded, hands resting on his stomach. 

Renjun takes this scene in—just takes it in, not thinking about anything else. 

"I'm not sure if it was Busan or Jeju or somewhere else. But we stayed in this little house, my mom's friend's house. We stayed there for a week. There was this particular night. I don't know, but I think there was a blackout? Because I remember it being very dark, everywhere. There was just this one house with a streetlamp working for some reason. Or maybe it was inside the house. And the moon was really big. Anyway, I don't know why, but the memory's very vivid. Just that moment.”

Renjun watches the way Jeno’s chest rises then falls.

“Maybe you can say it's as if the world had stopped then."

He tries to imagine it—little Jeno looking out and feeling like the world was about to end, tries to imagine how he had felt—if it’s how he’s feeling now—a mix of awe and a strange sense of calmness.

"Do you want to go out to the veranda?" Jeno asks, still looking out at the window. In Renjun’s mind, little Jeno’s still looking up at the moon and the odd lone working streetlamp, thinking about how the world had turned black and was about to end.

"The moon's going to gobble us up,” he replies.

Jeno laughs, a certain fondness in his voice. The feelings in his gut dance again. "That's okay."

The world almost looks abandoned, except there are a couple of houses with their lights turned on. The moon hides then peeks in a repeated pattern, clouds brought and carried away by the wind. From a distance, there are a couple of trees that sway with it.

Jeno sits beside him, silent.

They stay like that—just watching the world pause its existence, hovering between the lines of reality and dream.

"Sometimes I feel like I don't belong here," he says, close to a whisper. 

"What do you mean?"

"Like, my body's here, but also not."

He can feel Jeno’s eyes on him but doesn’t move to meet them.

"Well, do you not want to be here?"

The question comes a bit as a surprise. He mulls over it, asks himself repeatedly. He thinks about how tiring days can be, how hard they sometimes are. Jeno doesn’t interrupt his silence, just lets him think it over, going back to looking ahead. 

"I do,” he replies after a while. “I want to be here.”

Jeno doesn’t say anything, and they let the silence be.

"Hey."

"Hm?"

"Nothing."

"Hey."

"Hm."

“Wanna sneak out? Like that time?"

He pauses, heart in his throat.

He wonders if this will be one of the things he’ll regret, if he’s already starting to regret it.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Hey.”

“Yeah?”

"Doesn't it feel like the world's about to end?"

"Hm. I guess it does."

He looks at Jeno then, and, despite it all, he's happy the world's about to end with him by his side.

**—**

All the windows are open—the first thing he notes when he opens his eyes, feeling a soft breeze against his clammy skin. Afternoon sunlight creeps into the room, illuminating everything. Clear, bright, and crisp. There’s a feeling settling in his chest, gently rocking him awake, like wind dancing around him. He turns over and lies on his belly, grimacing at the uncomfortable contact against his skin.

At the desk beside his bed, one leg folded up on the chair, the other carries on unaware of his waking. He looks at him, eyeglasses sitting beautifully on his nose, sharp features cutting through the humid air, light cotton shirt moving along with the air from the electric fan directly pointed at him. 

"I feel like I woke up from a very long dream,” he voices, slowly becoming more aware at the way his own shirt clings to his body—all sweaty and agonizing. He kicks the blanket farther away from where it envelopes his shins, a part of it ending up hanging over the corner of his bed.

With a slight turn of the head, just for a split second, the other says, finally noticing him, "Don't be dramatic. You were asleep for at most 30 minutes."

Instead of replying, he gestures with the flailing of half his body for the other to turn the fan to his direction. When the harsh flow of air hits him, weakly fighting against the sultry afternoon’s seemingly serious mission of turning his room into hell on earth, he asks, “What are you doing?”

A slight twist of the wrist to show him his phone, the usual game eating up its entire screen. He continues lying on his belly, mind still feeling a bit foggy, the feeling continuing to settle on his chest, leisurely taking its time. He mindlessly wonders if he’s been playing that game the whole time he’s been asleep.

He watches as a drop of sweat runs through the side of the other’s face, settling on the corner of his cheekbone.

“What was your dream about?"

He moves a bit, the dampness of his bed already unbearable. "I can't remember,” he replies, pausing before saying, more to himself, "I feel like I lost a family."

The phone makes a sound declaring that another one of his virtual enemies has been shot. Without even a glance, his reply comes: "Auntie's right downstairs."

He doesn’t contend, remnants of sleep coupled with the lazy afternoon turning him sluggish. He takes in his bedroom—nothing much has changed since a year ago. He wonders if it’ll turn into a storage room soon, or maybe to another type of room altogether, wonders where all the rolled-up posters of different idol groups, his hundred pages of artwork, and the different pots of his succulents will be a couple years from now. Suddenly he’s thinking about how much he’s changed over the past year.

“Hey, remember that story I told you about?”

He turns his attention from where he’s been staring off into space to the boy a couple of inches away from him, glancing up to look at him, suddenly thinking about the abundance of times this scene has been replayed over the course of their first summer break as university students. “Which one?”

"When I was a kid and there was this blackout."

He hums, wiping off the sweat forming on his neck, then, when still nothing else comes, “Yeah?”

"Nothing. Just popped up in my mind while you were sleeping."

He clicks his tongue but doesn’t say anything. They both carry on—the other with his mind-numbing game, him with his attempt to turn the feeling in his chest into words he can relay to both the other and himself.

The door to his room is open too, he notes now. As are the others in the house, probably, he can tell from peeking out a bit. He thinks about the possibility of finding another place that isn't as exposed to the sun as his own, considers if spending the rest of the afternoon outside would be better or worse.

His neck begins to strain from lying on his underside a little too long.

His eyes land on the other again.

He thinks, suddenly, when he finally decides to give up on trying to understand a lot of things, about something that he's quite certain about—although becoming certain about it took an arduous couple of years. 

"Hey," he calls.

"Hm?"

Eyes following the way eyelashes touch, sweat trickle down, and light bounces off skin, he asks softly into his pillow, “Have I told you I loved you?”

A look, a smile forming.

“What? Still sleepy?”

He purses his lips, continues staring even as their eyes meet.

“You haven’t,” the other answers, a gentle and adoring smile finally dancing on his lips, the game on his phone forgotten.

"Well, I love you,” he says, calm.

There’s a buzzing somewhere outside, then the sound of neighbourhood kids playing outside their homes somewhere farther away; somewhere really far away, the sound of trees swaying against harsh wind vibrates through his being.

Time continues to pass, the world continues to exist, the sunlight continues to dance.

"I love you, too."

**Author's Note:**

> IDK was inspired when there was a blackout where i live and the wind was very strong!!!
> 
> edited 200527, wasnt satisfied with the way i wrote some things hehe


End file.
